[Ekaros]

Switched browsers, ended up using bing for a while... It was even worse. SEO has destroyed the Internet, it's pretty hard to find anything relevant anymore... Outside a very few sites like Reddit, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia. And each of those has it own host of issue. Somethings kinda still work like technical information. Now to think might it be that some engineers at Google actually try to keep that section somewhat usable?

[BitwiseFool]

I yearn for a curated search engine that only looks at a small section of the internet and completely omits notorious SEO abusing sites. Most of the time, I am not trying to search through the corpus of human knowledge (google's old goal), but rather, to perform a very specific kind of search in a specific problem domain.

[danskeren]

I'm working on something like this for code search (https://ask.moe/search/code), which currently consist of about 150 sites that I will continue to expand whenever I discover a useful site missing (e.g. official website of some package that contain good documentation).

I decided to start with code because it's something I personally use every day, and I got fed up with the spammy sites that just present an answer (or often only the question itself) extracted from StackOverflow, but plan to do something similar with other categories in the future. I'm curious to hear how you'd approach this problem, as in which categories you'd support and how you'd break it down?

[BitwiseFool]

I'm going to bookmark this and check it out.

I've got a suggestion, I queried "C# ?." and my results were mostly generic about C# documentation. I wanted to get more information about how to use the null conditional operator.

I suspect the query is ignoring the '?.' because it thinks of it as unimportant symbols. Would it be possible to modify the search engine to treat punctuation as operators, or terms in-and-of-themselves?

[danskeren]

Thanks, I'm afraid there's little I can do as it's just using Google Custom Search Engine with whitelisted dev sites, but it should work if you type out the meaning of the symbols, e.g. "C# null conditional" instead of "C# ?." (or "C# question mark dot" to figure out what the symbols mean).